Why It’s Time to Stop Parenting the Channel

With two young children, you can imagine a considerable amount of time is given over to parenting. We even correct our children when one ‘parents’ the other in an attempt to show who knows best. By parenting, we hope our kids will grow up in the way we intended, with the right values, outlook on life and general attitude to the world at large. That’s where we go wrong. It’s natural for every parent to assume that their children will simply pick up and act on everything they are told. We forget one fundamental. Our children are independent beings. They have their own thoughts, feelings, viewpoints and aspirations. To assume our own views somehow imprint over theirs does us and them a disservice. And the more they grow and mature, the more independent they become.

So it is with the channel. We hear so often that vendors are seeking to ‘better understand’ and ‘be more aligned to’ their partners. Yet doing so inevitably results in another structure of requirements, goal setting, planning and processes that seldom seem to have much connection to the needs of partners but everything to do with more efficient process for the vendor.

Now don’t get me wrong. Like parenting there was a time when the channel needed that nurturing. Like very young children, then in the early days of IT mass consumption, pioneered by the likes of HP, aspiring resellers looked to vendors to direct to provide what was needed. They need goals, boundaries and structure to operate in. But as the channel has matured, resellers ‘grew up’ and formed their own aspirations. They found they were not so aligned to the traditional vendors and went out to find new ones. Ask any parent about that – children will change role models to anything OTHER than their parents in some instances.

Now in 2016, I think it’s time to recognise that our channel has come of age. With the drive to cloud, so our channel children are achieving some of those aspirations. They seek (and are gaining) control of the customer, they are setting the agenda that vendors must follow. To continue to be successful, vendors, like parents of grown up children’ must embrace the channel’s achievements and actively encourage this transformation.

Of course, children do not forget their parents. Far from it. Vendors must still be there to coach, support and enable partners to fulfil their dreams and most importantly not judge when partners turn to them for help. Companies who do this, and who seek to partner with those organisations, like bChannels who exist to help partners Deliver the Future will stop ‘parenting’ their channel and will be the most successful in this new era.

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